Government Enforced Morality?

Great Debates
1

In another thread about taxes, I posted:

**

To which jshore replied:

Mandelstam agreed with him.

So, I ask: should the state seek to enforce anyone’s morality through the tax code and/or other economic policy? If so, who decides what morality is enforced? Would this be in any way fundamentally different from enforcing morality in non-economic areas, say by forbidding certain sexual practices?

Please note, I would like to confine this debate to the questions above, and not the actual objective conditions to which the policies would be applied. For instance, if you think economic inequality is immoral, and you think the state should do something about it through the tax code, then we will assume for the sake of argument that economic inequality does in fact exist. Arguments about whether economic inequality is real or bogus would be reserved for another thread.

2

Weird, just to help us Morality Enforcers® decide whether to reply seriously, can you please list the differences between addressing the moral questions involved in policy and legislating morality? It appears to me that if you don’t see the distinction there, we’re not likely to have a productive debate.

3

Weird Al, Thanks for clueing me in on this new thread. I agree with xenophon41’s point on this. To put it another way, if we are going to have any sort of society where we pool our resources to produce things like a justice system, a transportation system, an education system, etc., we are going to have to pay for them. This necessarily involves moral questions about who pays how much. This is very different than the government coming in and trying to legislate morality in your bedroom.

It is impossible not to deal with these questions because there are different notions of fairness. I mean, even if one believes the only fair way is to have everyone pay in exactly the amount of benefit they receive, the accounting that would go into trying to determine this would be mind boggling and would necessary involve “moral” issues about what constitutes “benefit”! In the absence of this, some people seem to believe that the only “fair” solution is a flat tax, whereby everyone pays the same percentage of their income in, but it is by no means obvious that this is a fair solution and in fact I can think of a number of arguments against it.

By the way, concerning the issue of how we arrive at the “moral” decisions about how to tax, well, that is what the political process is for. I am the first to say it is imperfect and in need of reform (mainly because it is too easily captured by those with the economic power and turned to their benefit), but there’s no way I can see that we can just do away with it. When the Republicans succeed in framing the estate tax as a moral evil and get it repealed, hell, I am not at all happy…And, I will fight against this view, that I think is totally and completely wrong-headed, within our political system. But, I am not going to complain that there was something inherently bad about them framing it as a moral issue. (I just think they got the moral issues totally screwed up and backward.)

4

Ummmm…if you are the one putting forth the thesis that there are differences between these two things, then shouldn’t you be the one to list what they are? Frankly, I’m not even sure if I understand your question.

We seem to have had a bit of a misunderstanding here, my fault I think, because I wasn’t clear in the OP. What I meant to address was a specific issue from the other thread, that of economic inequality. Perhaps I should have said, given that economic inequality exists, and is immoral, should the state attempt to rectify it? I was thinking more along the lines of whether taxpayers should be forced to support anti-poverty programs. This is why I said “tax code and/or other economic policy”.

Not that there isn’t also an interesting debate to be had about how we pay for things from which we all benefit, like national defense, in fact I have a rather involved theory about this, but I think that is for another thread. What I would like to stick to in this thread is what the state should do about the (assumed) moral problem of economic inequality, or poverty in general.

To put the whole question in relief, consider this: You believe (I assume) that it is immoral that we allow poverty to exist in our society while others are rich. You believe (I again assume) that we have a moral obligation to help those who live in poverty. Hence (still assuming) you want the state to take money from people who have plenty of it, and give it to those who are poor.

Seeing as how people don’t have a choice as to whether or not to pay their taxes, it seems you favor forcing your morality on others. I would like to know how this is fundamentally different from, say, someone else saying that it is morally wrong for men to have anal sex with each other, and supporting a law to ban it.

Would you find it acceptable if we arrived at such a law via the normal workings of the political process? You seem to think moral questions should be subject to it, as you said in your last post:

If there was something else in your post to which I did not respond, and to which you think I ought to have responded, I apologize…I know I hate it when people do that to me. I just wanted to clarify what I meant to be the terms of the debate before I started getting into it.

5

That’s alright, Al. You’ve answered my question. FTR, I meant pretty much the same thing that jshore meant. I wouldn’t frame every adjustment to policy as a moral issue, but there are moral issues affected by most changes, and certainly any national policy must satisfy moral considerations. (And I agree wholeheartedly with jshore that the determination of those moral issues is part of the political process.)

6

Ummmmm…ok…

Whose moral considerations?

Ahhh…is this an answer to the above question? The moral considerations of the majority. Hmmmm…“moral”…“majority”…has kind of a ring to it…

Supposing a majority of the electorate has a moral consideration that, say, that poverty is immoral , and through the political process effects the passage of a law that redistributes money from the rich to the poor, in part by forcing the rich to cough up the money…is this what you are talking about?

Similarly, if a majority of the electorate has a moral consideration that certain sexual practices are wrong, and through the political process effects the passage of a law banning it…fundamentally the same kind of thing, yes?

7

Nope. It’s close, but your language is a little loaded. Maybe we could mention that rich and poor alike contribute based on their abilities, and that the rich stay rich while the poor stay poor, but no one starves in the streets? If so, then YES, that’s what I’m talking about.

Nope. Redistribution of wealth because the majority believes suffering among their fellows must be assuaged is moral legislation. Banning a sexual practice because the majority feels it’s distasteful is legislating morality. The first case places a positive responsibility on the majority to cure a social ill (i.e. creates a process by which the majority must correct the bad thing); the second case puts a negative onus on the minority to change a private behavior (i.e. prohibits action which doesn’t effect the majority).

Again, if you don’t perceive a distinction between those cases, then of course you will never agree with jshore and Mandelstam’s positions.

8

WAE: *Supposing a majority of the electorate has a moral consideration that, say, that poverty is immoral , and through the political process effects the passage of a law that redistributes money from the rich to the poor, in part by forcing the rich to cough up the money…is this what you are talking about?

Similarly, if a majority of the electorate has a moral consideration that certain sexual practices are wrong, and through the political process effects the passage of a law banning it…fundamentally the same kind of thing, yes? *

As you frame the question, yes, but you must realize that you’re using a tremendously broad definition of “legislating morality” here. By this standard, when a majority of the electorate decides that racial discrimination is wrong and enacts civil rights legislation, that’s “legislating morality” too. Similarly, people who feel that taxation is coercion and push for lower tax rates on that account are also trying to legislate their own moral views on the supremacy of property rights. Looked at in this way, there are damn few political issues that can’t be interpreted as attempts to “legislate morality” in one way or another.

This is why, in serious political debate, we distinguish between different types of attempts to “legislate morality” according to their impact on, for example, individual rights. There’s an emerging judicial consensus (though it’s by no means completely established yet) that there exists a fundamental constitutional right to privacy which protects most consensual sexual acts between adults. So political attempts to “legislate morality” which forbids those sexual acts are (by many people) considered an infringement of that fundamental right, and therefore not acceptable. There is absolutely no judicial consensus that there exists any fundamental individual right not to be taxed by the government. So while the electorate can disagree all we want about which moral, practical, or ethical goals tax revenues should be used to promote, nobody’s rights are actually being violated by the use of their tax money for purposes that they personally disapprove of. If you think tax funds are being spent immorally, your only real recourse is to persuade other people to agree with you so that you can exert influence to change the way government spends its money. You don’t get an easy way out via the argument “This is illegitimate because it’s legislating morality!” All legislation is “legislating morality” according to your vague definition of the term; what makes that “illegitimate” is when it infringes constitutionally protected rights.

So in short, no, it is not logically or ethically inconsistent for liberals to support redistributive tax policies while simultaneously opposing anti-sodomy laws. Got anything else you’d like to talk about?

[Note added in preview: I like xeno’s distinction between “moral legislation” and “legislating morality”, but I’m not sure it captures the important issue of the role of individual rights vs. majority rule.)

9

Weird AL, I think the talk here is a little at cross purposes. If I read xeno and jshore right, they start by saying that some judgements about fairness inevitably enter political processes (if you like, a positive rather than a normative statement). How that turns out will depend on what decision-making process is being used, ideology, and of course any constitution or other institutional constraint there happens to be.

In the context of tax, this means that questions of fairness must be dealt with in the distribution of tax burdens, since many possible cost-“sharing” arrangements are possible for a given degree and composition of govenrment activity.

Now of course there is disagreement on what is a fair distribution of tax burdens. Equal (not feasible at current levels of government activity), proportional, marginal benefit (AKA Lindahl taxation), progressive, Rawlsian (inequality tolerated only insofar as it benefits the least well-off) etc etc. But nonetheless a decision will be made, reflecting a hybrid or mongrelised mix of those views.

Obviously your view of the initial distribution of income and wealth will affect this, as will your judgement about processes vs outcomes and any efficiency tradeoffs. If you think that the existing distribution of income and wealth is to a large extent arbitrary (me and I suspect xeno and jshore), then your view on what is justifiable will likely differ from someone who thinks that the existing distribution reflects productivity or effort (or is irrelevant) or that taking the property of some to enrich others is rarely or never justified (I’m guessing you and Libertarian, who may well join us soon).

But, one way or another, the group of individuals/ society will make a decision.

10

What picmr said and this…

It’s an easy mistake to make when you look deeply at the world for the first time, but I think, Al that you’re acting as though the world were created yesterday, just the way it is, so that any criticism of it seems to imply a moral judgement that wasn’t there before. In fact, moral judgements have everything to do with the world (or with US society) as you see it today.

Consider…

Centuries ago it became “moral” to protect property and to use force in order to do so. A few centuries later it became “moral” to give free adult males equal political rights; and, later still, “moral” to extend those rights to women and to freed slaves. By the late nineteenth century what became clear was that there was a contradiction between democracy (seen as the most “moral” form of government), and capitalism which, by that point was reducing the the great mass of workers to a struggle for subsistence. This was not an entirely new idea. That is, Enlightenment figures such as Rousseau had already assumed that political equality was meaningless without a degree of socio-economic equality. The oft-invokved “founding fathers” were not capitalists; the society they lived in was largely agricultural and pre-industrial. They never envisioned corporate monoliths like Standard Oil or GE; or a mass media controlled by a small number of CEOs.

So, starting in the late nineteenth century, democratic reforms were made to curb the anti-democratic effects of what was on the verge of becoming a plutocracy (rule by the wealthy). Although lots of people were very idealistic about these legislative reforms, it’s fair to think of them as pragmatic as well as “moral.” That is, workers had begun to organize into trade unions, and leftist political movements were stirring all over the world. So measures such as progressive taxation and the social safety net were introduced as much on pragmatic grounds (to prevent more radical forms of social change) as they were on “moral” grounds (to preserve the integrity of democratic governance). These ideas became part of the dominant political morality of the twentieth century.

When you see taxation as an imposition on you that interferes with your freedom and your rights, you’re unwittingly subscribing to an individualist revision of what has, historically, been the US ideal. Remember the pledge of allegiance? “One nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.” If we are “indivisible” that means that we often do things together, as a society, that we cannot do as individuals: like build roads, or prevent unfettered capitalism from poisoning our air or water, or insure banks, or promote new technologies like the Internet, or help to educate everyone in our society, including the poorest. We pay for these things through our taxes because, without them, civilization as we know it would be impossible (for ordinary people like us as well as for the very rich who need these stabilizing services to keep their enormous wealth secure.)

What you have to bear in mind therefore, is that when someone is arguing for regressive tax cuts (cuts that disproportionately benefit the wealthy), they’re the moral revisionists. They’re trying to alter moral assumptions about what is necessary to a functioning democracy; assumptions that became so commonsensical during the twentieth century that people no longer recognized them as such.

Because what the nineteenth century learned, and what the twentieth century took for granted, was that capitalism, left to itself, promotes “liberty and justice” for the few, not for all. Living in a new century you’ve undoubtedly read or heard that the “free market,” left to itself, benefits everyone; in actuality, the free market almost always leads to monopolies which generally benefit the owners of monopolies.

So just follow the money. And if you think taxes are absorbing too much of your hard-earned paycheck, as they may well be, ask yourself why the person who has millions or even billions is paying so tiny a proportion of his income. Whose interests does that version of “morality” represent?

11

Tax cuts disproportionately benefit the wealthy because the weathly are disproportionately taxed. I don’t think it is unreasonable either way. In a capitalist society making money of money, once all “needs” are taken care of, is easy enough. As such, it has always been most practical, and efficient, and popular, to disproportionately tax the wealthy.
As well, I don’t think monopolies are necessarily the result of a free market left to itself. I would side more with oligopolies. The monopolies of the past were formed in a transition from a agrarian society to an industrial one. As with all sudden shifts in a market, it is much easier for one to dominate. But, as with all things, in a free market it is difficult to be an “evil” monopolist or oligopolist. Cecil even mentioned it in his column “Why do all cigarette brands cost the same?” For inelastic commodities, “evil” -opolists get screwed by the little guy. In elastic markets, though, I can see that monopolies could form. But again, “evil” monopolies in an elastic market? Its elastic because demand changes; ie- it isn’t a necessary good, in which case, if the -opolist(s) tried to screw everyone we’d see the demand collapse. The legislation that so marks this centruy, the anti-trust acts, were, IMO, reactionary due to violent union tactics. Not that these tactics weren’t necessary; they were. But, as usual, the businesses got to hide behind existing laws until the politicians noticed, “Hey, I can get elected by catering to the little guy!” and instead of helping things cool off by spraying some bactine on an infection, they simply performed amputation.

But, enough of the hijack.

I agree with the “moral legislation” camp completely. I mean, really, why else would we legislate if we weren’t doing something “we” thought was right? I especially like the distinction made between moral legislation and legislating morals. But, still, there is a fine line there and I fear it gets crossed now and then.

12

erislover"Tax cuts disproportionately benefit the wealthy because the weathly are disproportionately taxed."

Correction: Bush’s tax cuts disproportionately benefit the wealthy because the wealthy are disporportionately taxed.
Targeted tax cuts do not disproproportionately benefit the wealthy and payroll tax cuts disproportionately benefit the working poor and middle class. During the election, targeted taxcuts consistently polled higher than did Bush’s plan; during the election more people voted for Gore than voted for Bush. Payroll tax cuts were not discussed by either candidate. Bush’s tax cut never would have happened if we lived in a functional* democracy.

But thank you for your interesting distinction between moral legislation and legislating morality :).

13

erislover"Tax cuts disproportionately benefit the wealthy because the weathly are disproportionately taxed."

Correction: Bush’s tax cuts disproportionately benefit the wealthy because the wealthy are disporportionately taxed.
Targeted tax cuts do not disproproportionately benefit the wealthy and payroll tax cuts disproportionately benefit the working poor and middle class. During the election, targeted taxcuts consistently polled higher than did Bush’s plan; during the election more people voted for Gore than voted for Bush. Payroll tax cuts were not discussed by either candidate. Bush’s tax cut never would have happened if we lived in a functional democracy.

But thank you for your interesting distinction between moral legislation and legislating morality :).

14

Just to add to Mandelstam’s point on Bush’s tax cuts, which I see as making the point that one could adopt tax cuts that did not disproportionately benefit the wealthy: Actually, it is worse than this…By focussing on income taxes and the estate tax, which are by far the most progressive of the different forms of taxation, Bush has actually cut the total tax burden of the wealthy in a greater proportion than the tax burden of the poor. I.e., it is not simply just that he has not chosen to cut taxes in a way that would make the tax burden more progressive, he has actually made it more regressive.

But, anyway, back to the main subject…I think there is another thing that you are missing here, Weird Al. You seem to think that there is a system set up that involves no moral judgements that contribute to the distribution of wealth and then the government comes in starts making moral judgements by redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor. What I am trying to say is that such a view is extremely naive. (1) We have already made all sorts of choices that affect the distribution of wealth simply in setting up the “game”. The tenets of corporate law, of patent law, etc. were not simply handed down by God. (2) There are many ways in which the government distributes wealth to the wealthy or provides services that benefit the wealthy to a much greater degree than the poor.

This is part of the whole naivety of the argument that conservatives like to use about liberals supporting the equality of outcomes and not just the equality of opportunity. The reality of the world is that it is very hard to enforce (and to even know when it is correctly being enforced) equality of opportunity. This is why it is necessary to consider outcomes to at least some degree. I mean, otherwise, if you really want to enforce the equality of opportunity, you have to extend to every child born the right to the same educational opportunities that Rockefellers’ kids have. You certainly can’t allow any sort of passing down of estates from one generation to the next! (Forget about eliminating the estate tax…You have to make it totally confiscatory.)

In short, the idea that we can set up a completely fair and value-free “game” and let the chips fall where they may is completely bogus. There are moral judgements in the equation from day-1.

15

Apologies to xenophon and kimstu whose posts I did not see prior to posting myself. Hence my confusion about who’d introduced the distinction about moral legislation. My computer crashed during my first attempt at a reply; and by the the time the board responded to me again I think Tolstoy might have posted War and Peace :).

16

Goodness…such a…uhhhh…high volume of responses. Perhaps I have touched a nerve. Please forgive me, but it is going to take me a little time to go through them all and respond. I did just want to say, though, welcome back Kimstu, hope you enjoyed your trip :smiley:

17

Take your time, Weird_Al–I’d not want you to overtax those Einstein-like nerve-touching capacities of yours :wink:

18

Ok, I’ve decided I am going to go linear here…I am going to simply respond to each post in the order it is posted. This means I will be making a number of smaller posts instead of one super long one, which is probably better anyway…you’ll see my sig more…perhaps I should think about getting a new one…

Anyway:

Loaded how? What hidden assumptions have I made?

I think it is rather oxymoronic to talk about poor people “contributing” to anti-poverty programs. They don’t of course. They benefit from them. The rest of us contribute.

I don’t personally think any system designed to make the rich not rich would work very well for anyone. The poor would still stay poor of course…

You don’t want people to starve in the streets. Neither do I. Why don’t we want this? Because we feel it would be morally wrong to permit such a thing to happen. If someone does not share this moral value with us, do we have a right to force that person to contribute to our food drive?

I have read and re-read the above paragraph several times, and I still can’t make sense of it. This alleged difference between “moral legislation” and “legislating morality” sounds like six of one and a half-dozen of the other to me. The very terms you use to define “moral legislation” are inherently subjective…“social ill”, “bad thing”…who gets to define these things?

By way of contrast, your definition of “legislating morality” was quite clear. It seems to me the only difference betwwen my two examples is that in one, individuals are being forced to do something, and in the other they are being forced rto not do something.

I don’t and I don’t, though I never say never…

19

To what civil rights legislation are you referring?

I do not follow the logic here at all. You are referring here to people who are trying to get the state to not force morality on them.

You are right. Most if not all of the state’s acts can be construed to have a moral dimension of some kind. For that matter, many of the things we do in our private lives also have a moral dimension. But this is not relevent to the debate. What I have a problem with is coercive legislation created only for the purpose of advancing someone’s morality, and which has no other justification.

Whether or not there is a judicial consensus on something is irrelevent to the debate. A judicial consensus is created by judges. Judges are part of the government. I asked in the OP, “should the state seek to enforce anyone’s morality?”; judges and their “judicial consensus” are part of “the state”. I’m sorry I haven’t made this clearer; I have been talking a lot about legislating morality, true, but the legislature is not the only part of the state.

It is not a question of whether or not I approve or dissaprove of any government expenditure, but whether or not, as I said in the OP, the state should seek to enforce anyone’s morality through the tax code and/or other economic policy.

True as far as it goes, but again, not relevent to the debate. The question is, should the government spend tax funds when the only justification for doing so is someone’s moral values?

Depends on how you define “illegitimate”.

See my answer above, the one that starts “You are right. Most if not all…” etc.

What consitutionally protected rights we have depends in very large measure on how the courts, especially the Supreme Court, interprets the constitution. The Supreme Court is part of the state. I refer you to what I said earlier, starting with “Whether or not there is a judicial consensus…” etc.

So you say. I am far from convinced.

Heh heh heh. There sure is. And I think you know where too.
:smiley:

If you like it, perhaps you can explain it to me.

20

How exactly can questions of fairness be “dealt with” when no agreed-upon definition of “fairness” exists?

You seem to be saying that people will disagree about what is fair, and hence what is moral. This is obviously true, but again, the debate is, should your definition of “fairness” be privileged over mine?

People are always making decisions, about their own selves and their own lives. The question is, should you be able to force me to go along with your decisions on moral issues?